Ferraro's Memoirs Wallow In Self-pity, Bitterness

October 4, 1985|By Stephen Chapman, Tribune Media Services

Geraldine Ferraro, who boasts one of the most sensitive sexism-detectors around, nonetheless writes that her campaign for vice president proved ''that women can run for high political office. We have proved we have the stamina to get through a campaign, to stand up for our beliefs in a national televised debate, to articulate the issues. And we have certainly proved that women are able to stand up under pressure.''

Actually, the campaign proved nothing about ''women,'' whatever it might have revealed about this particular woman. Some of us, unlike Ferraro, never doubted the congenital ability of female politicians to meet the same demands as males.

In an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Ferraro: My Story, published in Newsweek, Walter Mondale's running mate indulges in self-glorification and, more often, self-pity. ''As the mother of Laura and Donna Zaccaro, my candidacy had been well worth it, expanding their life options a thousandfold,'' she writes. But she couldn't imagine ''the bigotry and sexism my candidacy would unleash.''

Her unreasoned bitterness colors every paragraph. Ferraro resented being told what to do by Mondale's staff, as if she were the first running mate to be treated that way. She resented being compared to San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, the other female Mondale considered for the second spot, forgetting that neither would have been considered had they been men. She even resented ''the incongruity'' of toasting an English muffin for the Mondale aide who had come to her house early one morning before the convention. Was her guest supposed to do it himself?

Here is the grating paradox of Ferraro's memoir: She catalogues every slight that could possibly be motivated by prejudice against women, but she never considers if she would have got the opportunity she did except for the accident of her sex. Would Walter Mondale have put an unknown New York congressman on a national ticket? Would Bantam Books have paid a losing candidate for vice president $1 million for his story?

Nothing else justifies the attention. The excerpt offers no serious reflection on the sources of Ronald Reagan's landslide victory. Ferraro even has the chutzpah to say ''the people were with us on the issues.'' She has nothing interesting to say about those issues.

As ever, Ferraro is unfailingly nervy. She still pretends there was nothing wrong with refusing to report her husband's income on her congressional ethics form, ignoring the finding of the House Ethics Committee that she ''improperly claimed'' the spousal exemption. She excuses him from borrowing funds from an incapacitated elderly widow whose estate he administered, noting that he paid it back with more interest than it had earned in a money market account.

She is equally obtuse on the subject of abortion. ''As a Catholic, I have always accepted the premise that a fertilized ovum is life,'' she writes. ''But others do not always agree. Why should my Catholic belief override theirs? The separation of church and state is one of the founding principles of our Constitution.''

To pretend that killing what Ferraro admits is a human being should be a mere matter of personal choice is idiotic. And to suggest that Catholic opposition to legal abortion violates the First Amendment (this woman graduated from law school?) is not only idiotic but hypocritical. Did she ever criticize the American Catholic bishops for presuming to issue a pastoral letter on nuclear weapons, or Martin Luther King Jr. for using his pulpit to advance civil rights? Ferraro's vapid protests reveal her to be either dumb or dishonest.

At one time, political memoirs were a species of literature and a contribution to history. Judging from this excerpt, if Ferraro's hadn't been written, it wouldn't have been missed.